The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic form validation, and more particularly to dynamically validating form inputs based on data available from the World Wide Web using semantic search.
Electronic forms are ubiquitous on the Internet. Almost every organization that offers online services will require some electronic form to be filled out. Typically forms may include a user registration form, as well as additional forms to capture more details or interact with other systems. In essence, every single transaction that requires user input is conducted via the façade of a form. Form validation is an integral part of any connected systems to ensure that the input is meaningful when processed by backend business operations. Validation ranges from the most basic form of ensuring correct syntax, type constraints, and dependency to the more complex business rules sanity check. For instance, an e-commerce service may make heavy use of form validation to ensure that users create valid accounts and enter valid payment details. Prohibiting invalid input not only ensures the smooth processing of backend business operations, but also is increasingly more essential against malicious attacks such as Cross-Site-Scripting (XXS) and Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection.